Freezing the Teacher Salary Schedule Could Save $25,000,000 a Year

Towards the end of last session I heard a rumour coming out of Don Cox's office that the state was considering "freezing" the state salary schedule, meaning that the step increases teachers receive in their first 15 years of teaching would be suspended and your salary for this year would be the same as your salary for last year (less the LID days, which is another topic). It was a proposal that didn't get anywhere, but there is a savings there, and I was a little surprised not to see it percolate back up given where we're at in the state budget.

So over the weekend I played with a couple of documents from the Superintendent of Public Instruction. First is the Personnel Report that details how many teachers there are in the state; the second, the salary schedule that shows what we teachers were paid last year and this year. I plugged it all into this spreadsheet:

• The first line is the salary from the 2008-2009 school year.
  
• Next, the salary that a person in the same column would have received the very next year, 2009-2010, assuming they stayed in the same "lane".
  
• The next line is the difference between the two numbers; this is the raise that a hypothetical person would have received from year-to-year.
  
• The fourth line is taken from the personnel summary, and shows how many people in 2008-2009 were at that place on the salary schedule. For example, in 2008-2009 there were 774 teachers who had a Bachelor's Degree only (no additional credits) and were in their first year of teaching.
  
• The final line is that number of teachers multiplied by the additional salary they would have received, creating a total for every teacher in that cell.

Put it all together for all the teachers in their first 15 years of teaching, and the spreadsheet says that we spent an additional $28,982,381 by not freezing the schedule last year.

There's a lot of assumptions that go into this: that all those teachers came back, that they were all charged to the state, and that they are reported correctly to OSPI. On the other hand, I'm also not figuring in any increases for moving over "lanes" (e.g., moving from the BA+45 column to the MA+0 column), or mid-year hires, etc. Plus, I'm an amateur--there could potentially be a lot more to be found there, because I"m not looking at the right chart or reading the right numbers in the right way.

But let's say that I'm full of crap and off by even 20%. That's still almost $25 million dollars in potential savings, which is something that we can't ignore. Do I like the idea of taking money from teachers? Absolutely not, but this isn't a "go backwards" deal--it's working to maintain what we already have.

My bottom line is levy equalization. If we can make enough sacrifices in other places to keep LEA, then we've accomplished something meaningful. Offering step increases to those employees in the first 15 years, those who are the most likely to be impacted by district cuts if levy equalization goes away, makes about as much sense as putting on your makeup before a trip to the guillotine.

Read more here, if any.

There's Good Money in the Ed Reform Racket

The University of Washington's very own Marguerite Roza, an assistant professor at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, made quite a splash recently with a study arguing that states should no longer pay additional money to teachers when they earn Masters degrees. This isn't a new line of thought, but getting a full page write-up in Education Week and a mention in the Education Gadfly in short order isn't a bad month for an education researcher.

I've written about her before as well, here.

Her research is pretty counterintuitive, particularly to a happy union hack such as myself. Recent topics have included the idea that teachers could take a pay-cut to stave off layoffs, that insurance benefits are rather wasted, and now this new bon mot about degrees. It makes one wonder, how comfortable is this professor who has made the thrust of her research an examination on how to take salary and benefits away from teachers?

Turns out, courtesy of the state salary database at the News Tribune, that Dr. Roza is doing quite well indeed--a $10,400 monthly base salary, which works out to a cool $124,800 per year. Not too shabby!

I've ragged on Dan Goldhaber of the UW before, too--he's written about education, and is a very convincing public speaker, but the ideas that he presented during the Basic Ed Finance hearings were waaaaaaaaay out there. According to the Tribune Dr. Goldhaber makes $13,530 a month, or $162,360 a year. Those numbers are provided by the state.

Want to know why teachers are often so cynical about change agents? Because it's usually not the change agent who will be most affected by whatever grand idea is being proposed--it's the teachers.

(For the record, I made $46,341 last year with a Masters degree plus 8 years)

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Did You Say the Future, Conan?

One of the sessions at WERA a few weeks back was on School Employee Compensation and Student Outcomes, presented by staff from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy and based off of their report of the same name from December 2007. It’s actually pretty good reading, as academic reports go; particularly interesting to me were the long-term looks at national graduation rates (less than 10% in 1900, nearly 70% today) and the discussion about what the immediate goals of our state legislature are regarding funding and results.

You can download the report here.

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First Look: The Teaching Penalty, by the Economic Policy Institute

I like to read academic studies of teacher pay, because they’re totally non-controversial and everyone agrees with them. /sarcasm

The Teaching Penalty is a new book out from the Economic Policy Institute that looks at the most recent trends in teacher pay, and it’s not looking good for educators, especially in the last decade. From the report:

An analysis of trends in weekly earnings shows that public school teachers in 2006 earned 15% lower weekly earnings than comparable workers, a gap 1 percentage point larger than that reported for 2003 in our original study. The teacher disadvantage in weekly earnings relative to comparable workers grew by 13.4 percentage points between 1979 and 2006, with most of the erosion (9.0 percentage points) occurring in the last 10 years (between 1996 and 2006).

I’ll be giving it a full read-through to check the methodology, but if it stands up to scrutiny it’s a great report for teachers. The WEA thinks so, too, though the EFF disagrees.

Read more here, if any.

The EFF Podcast on Posting Teacher Salary Data Online

The Evergreen Freedom Foundation is in a good groove with their Get Free podcasts. The hosts are entertaining, the topics are worthwhile, and the production value is praiseworthy. Even though I’m a liberal (who still finds their video podcast host very easy on the eyes) I can give credit where it's due.

In their most recent podcast there’s a discussion of the EFF’s habit of posting teacher salary data on-line. Sonya Jones, who really comes off as rather bitchy in her blog posts, had gotten a letter from a teacher who didn’t realize that this was the practice and that it was just one of those things that we teachers have to deal with by virtue of being state employees.

The piece from the podcast that’s interesting is the defense that the hosts put up, offering that it’s not about individual teachers, really, but more about giving the public information on the system as a whole.

I think this defense fails. I can see where they’re trying to go, but I don’t think they quite get there.

The biggest flaw is simply in how their spreadsheets on salary data are constructed. As a union guy I’ll freely admit that I’ve used them on more than a couple of occasions to help various causes, and from that perspective I can tell you that the problem with the spreadsheets is that there is no differentiation between various job classes. You can’t look at any one of them and tell what the average teacher makes in district X, because if you aggregate all of the names and data for any individual school district you’ll also pull in the paraprofessionals (artificially lowering the average) and the administration (raising it up, though not by nearly as much a percentage). Even if you have a rote understanding of what the range of a teacher’s salary is, I’m willing to bet that the consumer at large could look at the raw data and pull in custodians (since most of them work a 240 day year) and paraprofessional supervisory staff.

Last year I looked at the same topic and asked whether this data was usable data, and as constructed I don’t know that it is.

If you've accessed the spreadsheets and used them, what did you use them for?

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The Schoolyard Bully

From the tone of this article, you'd have to think it's the NEA and the AFT.

A piece from the article that doesn't work:

Or consider performance-based pay. Forty percent of teachers leave the classroom within their first five years on the job — in some measure because they don’t stand to gain the same performance-based pay raises available to their private-sector counterparts. Merit pay would help public schools retain good teachers by paying them more.

Let's note first that "in some measure" is a wonderfully inexact phrase; it could be one teacher, it could be all of them. Let's note too that as long as teaching is a government function there's a built-in incentive to keep costs vis-a-vis payroll down, so this idea that there's an untapped funding source out there just waiting to go to teachers is a figment of the imagination.

I'm taking a school law class now taught by a former superintendent who now does a ton of work for school districts locally as a hearing officer, investigator, and superintendent search consultant. He looked kindly on the proposed merit pay plan out of Idaho that would have given teachers raises of about $3,000 in return for giving up tenure; if you extrapolate that same number into Washington, with 80,000 teachers, you'd be looking at a cost of $240,000,000. It's not doable.

I think that if you do it right merit pay could work, under the perfect conditions and appropriate reasons. We can't pretend, though, that merit pay is a way to solve the salary gap, and it has to be acknowledged that (as with most things in life) it's impossible to do in a completely fair manner.

I do enjoy the discussion, though.

Read more here, if any.

The Over Paid Teacher

There’s a lot of people out there who talk about teacher salaries in the abstract—“They’re overpaid! They’re underpaid! They’re paid just right!”, etc. Since teacher salaries are a matter of public record there’s not a whole lot to be argued about there, but what about the other numbers like benefits, retirement, etc.?

On Friday I got my annual statement summarizing all my paychecks for the year. I give you those numbers here so that you can know exactly what it’s like.

• Social security wages: $42,864.02
  
• Wages, tips, other compensation: $35,822.74
  
• Federal income tax withheld: $4,390.32
  
• Social security tax withheld: $2,657.56
  
• Medicare tax withheld: $621.53

That’s basically the information from the W2. The central number is the second, because that was nominally my take home pay after taking out the income tax and social security.

Oh, but there were other deductions:

• L&I: $48.72
  
• Section 125 ME: $4,077.82
  
• Union Dues: $732.64
  
• Retirement: $7,041.28

The total of those deductions is $11,900.46. When you subtract that from the line above it leaves about $24,000, or $2,000 a month.

What’s that Section 125 ME number? That’s what I pay in health insurance out of pocket per year, or about $340 a month. If anyone tells you that all teachers get their health insurance paid for, slap them with a trout. Know too that I voluntarily put far more into my retirement plan than I have to, but on TRS3 if you don’t save for yourself you’re absolutely screwed.

This is my reality. What's yours?

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Goldhaber Watch Continues!

Joanne Jacobs also picked up on the Goldhaber op-ed that I wrote about yesterday, but her post is better because she has a national perspective. It’s interesting to see what other states are finding the dollar amount needs to be to convince teachers to voluntarily transfer into high-poverty, high-need schools--it's pretty obvious that a couple thousand dollars isn't enough.

Read more here, if any.

A Technical Review of Merit Pay

The National Institute for Excellence in Teaching recently released a report, “Creating a Successful Performance Compensation System for Educators,” which compiles much of the existing research on the subject into a very vanilla but functional read on the issue.

It is interesting to see where some of the programs draw their money from. In one of the appendices they take a look at a merit program in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana and how they developed their financial model, including drawing money from Title I, II, V, IDEA, and the K-3 Reading Initiative. If they’re pulling the money for the teacher merit pay program from student programs, I sure hope the merit program is working. If not, it’s a terrible injustice.

Those interested in the issue might also get a kick out of “Performance-Pay for Teachers: Designing a System that Students Deserve,” from the Center for Teaching Quality. It’s a much easier read than the NIET report, with some solid examples on how a performance-pay program could work. You can find it here.

For a mildly contrarian point of view, consider finding a copy of the April 11th, 2007 edition of Education Week and reading the editorial “Not Performance Pay Alone: Teacher Incentives Must Be Matched by Systemwide Change.” You can’t get to it online without being an EdWeek subscriber, so try your local library (or here!). Written by Theodore Hershberg and Barbara Lea-Kruger of Operation Public Education, it makes the valid point that implementing merit pay without making some important systemic changes is a formula for failure.

Someday, a district here in Washington will take the leap. It’ll be a seminal moment.

Read more here, if any.

If something isn't controversial, do you need to say it isn't controversial?

Surfing around to take a break from lesson planning I ended up at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation's website, where they've posted their annual list of teacher salaries in Washington State. It lists everybody alphabetically by district; if you were paid by a school, you're in there somewhere.

I get that our salary is a matter of public record; there's a couple of things worth commenting on in their press release, though:

On March 27, 2007, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) updated its complete look at the Washington State Teacher Salaries database. This database allows parents and interested citizens to review the salary and benefits of any teacher or other school employee in Washington State. All information is provided by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

EFF begin this listing 3 years ago as an effort to allow citizens to know exactly how much these “public employees” were being paid.

“These figures go along to dispelling any myths that are out their regarding teacher’s salaries in Washington State,” said Steven Maggi, director of EFF’s Education Reform Center. “We believe that it is important to use actual data when discussing school funding issues. Using actual salary and benefit figures makes the topic of attracting and retaining excellent teachers easier to understand and is not controversial.”

It's a small thing, but why did they put "public employees" in quotes? Are teachers not public employees? I grant that my own biases may well play a role here, but one could easily read that as the EFF being snarky, and what does that do for them?

Then there's that last quote, and it's where the title of the post came from: why do you have to tell us that this isn't controversial? If it's not controversial, shouldn't that fact stand by itself without needing to be said? Perhaps Mr. Maggi's point was that making the real numbers available makes comparison possible in a non-controversial way, but if that's what he was getting at he buried it under some poor sentence structure.

There's also the very real possibility of math hijinx. If I take the average of all the districts M through O, the average total salary of a teacher is about $39,000. The trick is that includes parapros, bus drivers, administrators, etc, artificially raising some classes and lowering others.

What the EFF has given us here is data, but is it useful data?

Read more here, if any.